MIAMI - Novelist Ernest Hemingway's troubled youngest
son died of natural causes in a jail cell. He was 69.

Gregory Hemingway, a former doctor also known as Gloria Hemingway,
was found dead at 5:45 a.m. Monday, said Janelle Hall, a spokeswoman
for the county corrections department. He had been arrested last
week, at least his third arrest in the county.

He often dressed as a woman, and Hall said jail officials
had classified him as a woman and believe he had undergone a
sex change operation. He died in the women's section of the jail.

Police said family members, whose names they did not make
public, confirmed the deceased was Ernest Hemingway's son.

The elder Hemingway killed himself in 1961. A book Gregory
Hemingway wrote about his father, "Papa: A Personal Memoir,"
was published in 1976. It had a preface by Norman Mailer.

In 1997, Hemingway joined with his brothers, Jack and Patrick,
in battling the organizers of the sometimes rowdy Hemingway Days
celebration in Key West. They said they wanted a more dignified
gathering and royalty payments. The celebration was canceled
but then revived. Jack Hemingway, who also wrote a memoir of
his father, died last year.

Gregory Hemingway's daughter is Lorian Hemingway, author of
such books as "Walk on Water: A Memoir."

But alcohol and other problems stalked his life.

"My mother suffered severe brain damage as a result of
a car accident directly related to her addiction," Lorian
Hemingway has written. "My father lost his medical license
for the same reason." Gregory Hemingway had been arrested
last week on Key Biscayne, charged with indecent exposure and
resisting arrest without violence after a park ranger reported
a pedestrian with no clothes on.

He appeared to be drunk or otherwise impaired, said the arresting
officer, Nelia Real. "He had no shoes and he had a dress
and high heels in his hands," Real said.

"I feel really bad that that happened. He was a very
nice guy."

Homicide detectives ruled the death was due to natural causes.
The autopsy report listed hypertension and cardiovascular disease,
officials said according to Miami-Dade police spokesman Juan
DelCastillo. Miami-Dade court records show that he had been arrested
in 1996 on an aggravated assault charge and in 1995 on a charge
of battery on an officer. The outcome of those cases was not
immediately available.

Hemingway, son of the author and his second wife, Pauline
Pfeiffer, was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Nov. 12, 1931.

In 1999, Hemingway spoke at the dedication of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer
museum in Piggott, Ark., in what had been the Pfeiffer family
home. He remarked that his father "is quite fortunate in
having just about every place he ever lived in immortalized."

MIAMI -- Gregory Hemingway, the youngest son of macho
novelist Ernest Hemingway, died a transsexual by the name of
Gloria in a cell at a women's jail, authorities said. He was
69.

Hemingway - a former doctor who wrote a well-received book
about his father, "Papa: A Personal Memoir" - was found
dead Monday of what the medical examiner's office said was high
blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

He had been arrested last week, at least his third arrest
in the county. He was in jail awaiting a court appearance on
charges of indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence.

Janelle Hall, a spokeswoman for the county corrections department,
said Hemingway had undergone a sex-change operation. Hall said
she did not know when.
Key Biscayne police had arrested Hemingway at a park on Sept.
25 afer finding him putting on his underwear. He was carrying
a dress and high-heeled shoes. He appeared intoxicated or mentally
impaired, officer Nelia Real said.

"He said his name was Gloria," Real said. "He
looked like a man, but his nails were painted and he was wearing
jewelry and makeup. ... He was very nice to me. At times he was
very coherent, but other times he didn't make any sense."

The son of the author and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer,
was born in Kansas City, Mo., and graduated from the University
of Miami Medical School. The elder Hemingway committed suicide
in 1961.

In Gregory Hemingway's 1976 book, which had a preface by Norman
Mailer, the novelist's son wrote: "I never got over a sense
of responsibility for my father's death. And the recollection
of it sometimes made me act in strange ways."

Hemingway's Florida medical license was revoked in 1988 after
Montana authorities would not renew his license to practice in
that state. His daughter, Lorian Hemingway, wrote a 1992 memoir,
"Walk on Water," in which she said her father lost
his medical license because of an addiction.

Hemingway was married four times. His last marriage, in 1992,
ended in divorce in 1995.

Hemingway, whose last known address was in Miami's Coconut
Grove, had been arrested at least three times in the mid-1990s
on charges including battery on a police officer and aggravated
assault. The outcome of those cases was not immediately available.

In 1997, Hemingway joined with his brothers, Jack and Patrick,
in battling the organizers of the sometimes rowdy Hemingway Days
celebration in Key West. They said they wanted a more dignified
gathering and royalty payments. The celebration was canceled
but then revived. Jack Hemingway, who also wrote a memoir of
his father, died last year.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Gregory Hemingway, whose troubled
relationship with his late father, writer Ernest Hemingway, led
him to a tormented life of drink and depression, has died in
Miami, officials said on Thursday.

It was another sad chapter in the story of the literary lion's
family.

Hemingway, 69, died of natural causes in a Miami jail after
being arrested for indecent exposure.

He was picked up last Wednesday after walking naked down the
street in Key Biscayne, a Miami island community, carrying a
pair of black high heels and wearing jewelry, police said.

``He had a difficult life. It's not easy to be the son of
a great man,'' Scott Donaldson, president of the Hemingway Society,
told Reuters.

Gregory, younger brother to Jack and Patrick, struggled to
cope with the burden. A transvestite who later had a sex-change
operation, he suffered bouts of drinking, depression and drifting,
according to acquaintances.

``I don't know how it was done, the destruction,'' he said
in a 1987 interview with the Washington Post. ``What is it about
a loving, dominating, basically well-intentioned father that
makes you end up going nuts?''

At the time of his death, he lived in the Coconut Grove district
where he was well-known to its Bohemian crowd. He sometimes went
by the name of Gloria and wore women's clothes.

Last Wednesday, he was reported walking naked through Key
Biscayne. When an officer arrived, he was sitting on a curb trying
to put on a flowered thong, the police report said.

He had a hospital gown wrapped around his shoulder but was
exposing a breast and his genitals, it said. When the officer
tried to arrest him, he screamed and refused to be handcuffed.

He gave the name Greg Hemingway, then later changed it to
Gloria, the report added.

FOUND DEAD IN CELL

Taken to the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center, he was found
dead in his cell early on Monday, spokeswoman Janelle Hall said.
The cause of death was hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

He had been due to appear in court later that day on charges
of indecent exposure and resisting arrest. He was booked into
the women's jail because he had a sex-change operation, Hall
added.

Strange and tragic deaths have haunted the Hemingway family.

Ernest, the Nobel Prize-winning author who was almost as famous
for his adventurous life as for works like ``The Old Man and
the Sea'' and ``The Sun Also Rises,'' shot himself in 1961. Ernest's
father, brother and sister also committed suicide.

Actress and model Margaux Hemingway, Jack's daughter, was
found dead in Santa Monica in 1996 at the age of 41 after battles
with alcohol, drugs and depression.

Gregory was born in Kansas City in 1931. His mother was Hemingway's
second wife Pauline. He lived his early years in Key West.

``In many ways he was the most talented as a boy -- he was
a wonderful shooter. He won pigeon-shooting competitions down
in Cuba,'' Donaldson said.

In the Post interview, Hemingway spoke about the pressures
of trying to live up to the expectations of his macho father.
He once killed 18 elephants on a safari in Africa.

`Yes, I had the most talent. I was the brightest, I could
do so many of the things he loved most,'' he said. He also said
his father knew about his cross-dressing.

``I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying not to
be a transvestite. It's a combination of things -- first you've
got this father who's super-masculine but who's somehow protesting
it all the time. He's worried to death about it.''

KNOWN AS GIGI

Known to the family as Gigi, he attended the University of
Miami medical school. He later practiced medicine, including
a period as a country physician in Montana, but lost his license
as he wrestled with alcohol and his personal demons.

He said he had received electric shock treatment many times
and had several nervous breakdowns. He sometimes drifted, living
in cars, motels or friends' houses.
But family and acquaintances remembered him as a man who could
be charming, kind and brilliant on his good days.

``I loved him and he was a good man,'' said his daughter Lorian
Hemingway from her home in Seattle.

``He was a man of great compassion and self-searching, and
he bore the necessary cross of being human. I believe the thing
he wanted most of all was to please others and to be loved,''
said Lorian, whose book ``Walk on Water'' was nominated for the
1999 Pulitzer Prize.

``Everything in his life was troubled. He was troubled by
his relationship with his father, with his mother,'' said one
acquaintance. ``I would say he was tormented.''

He married four times, the last time in Key West in 1992 in
a ceremony in the old Hemingway house. That marriage ended in
divorce in 1995, according to the Miami Herald. He is believed
to have had six children.

In letters to his father, Gregory called him an ``ailing alcoholic''
and derided ``The Old Man and the Sea'' as ''sentimental slop.''

In Ernest's book ``Islands in the Stream,'' novelist Thomas
Hudson's son Andy -- ``the meanest'' -- is based on Gregory.

Gregory wrote about their relationship in a book ``Papa: A
Personal Memoir,'' published in 1976, which opened: ``I never
got over the sense of responsibility for my father's death and
the recollection of it sometimes made me act in strange ways.''

But he also spoke of the good times, like playing war games
in the yard of the Key West house.

From elephant hunter to bejeweled exhibitionist, the tortured
life of Gregory Hemingway.

By Nara Schoenberg CHICAGO TRIBUNE

November 19, 2001

Miami

ON HIS last night as a free man, Ernest Hemingway's youngest
son slipped on a demure black cocktail dress and made his way
to a small private party in the upscale Miami enclave of Coconut
Grove.

He introduced himself to friends as "Vanessa" and
spent much of the evening in the kitchen, chatting with millionaires
in country club attire. Guests say he didn't get drunk. He seemed
to be in good spirits.

"The odd thing about it was, he looked happy," says
writer Peter Myers, who had never seen his old friend dressed
as a woman before.

"I'd say he looked about 20 years younger. He looked
comfortable." But things took a rapid turn for the worse,
as things often did in the life of Gregory Hemingway, a doctor
who had lost his medical license, a writer who hadn't published
a book in 20 years, a husband who had been divorced from four
wives.

Less than 24 hours after he successfully introduced his female
identity to some of his oldest and most respectable Florida friends,
he resurfaced in the nearby community of Key Biscayne.

Perhaps he wanted to celebrate his triumph at a local bar,
a friend says. Maybe he intended to take a walk on the beach.

What is clear is that at about 4 p.m. the next day, Sept.
25, the burly transsexual was seen parading down a main Key Biscayne
thoroughfare, naked, with a dress and heels in his hand. Taken
into custody by an officer who described him as "very nice"
and perhaps mentally unstable, he was charged with indecent exposure
and resisting arrest without violence.

After a medical exam showed he had undergone a sex change,
he was jailed - on a mere $1,000 bail - at the Miami-Dade Women's
Detention Center.

On Oct. 1, his sixth day in jail, Hemingway, who suffered
from high blood pressure and heart disease, rose early for a
court appearance, began to dress and suddenly collapsed in his
underwear onto the concrete floor.

The third son of the 20th century's most resolutely macho
literary figure had died, at age 69, in a women's jail.

Gregory Hemingway's journey from elephant hunter to bejeweled
exhibitionist, from the boy who appeared to have everything to
the prisoner in cell 3-C2, was long and winding, marked by many
detours and numerous contradictions.

On this much, however, friends and family agree: He suffered
from manic depression, a form of mental illness. Even in a family
tormented by chemical imbalance - Gregory's father, paternal
grandfather, uncle, aunt and niece all committed suicide - the
man who sometimes called himself Gloria was notably tormented.

"He had hundreds of shock treatments, and he kind of
got to like them," says Jeffrey Meyers, who wrote one of
several major biographies of Ernest Hemingway. "It was like
an addiction. Most people are terrified of shock treatments.
If you read Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar,' it's not something
you would willingly do."

There are many who remember Gregory Hemingway as unfailingly
gentle and generous, but when he was in the manic - or euphoric
- stage of his disease he could be reckless, even violent. He
had a string of arrests in Florida and Montana, where he spent
his winters, including one in which he threatened to expose himself
and kicked a police officer in the groin.

Other factors in Hemingway's decline, his associates say,
may have included a chaotic childhood, a complex relationship
with his mother and a sometimes overwhelming desire for acknowledgment
from his famous father.

And then there were the dresses.

At the heart of Hemingway's tangled tale was a lifelong flirtation
with femininity that enraged Ernest, that epitome of swaggering
American machismo, and led to a series of father-son confrontations
that scarred Gregory as a boy and haunted him as an adult.

The battles date back to at least the early 1940s, when, according
to Gregory's friend, the poet Donald Junkins, Ernest walked in
on Gregory - then about 10 - while his athletic young son, the
skeet shooter with the mischievous grin, was trying on his stepmother
Martha Gellhorn's dress and nylons. Ernest "went berserk,"
Junkins says.

Father and son appear to have remained close for several years
after that, with Ernest even tutoring the boy he called Gig for
a career as a writer. But by the time Gregory was 19, he and
Ernest were locked in bloody psychological warfare over the lure
of silk and taffeta.

It was a battle that would span much of the son's life and
continue for decades after the father's death.

***

Ernest Hemingway was a man who got what he wanted: the biggest
fish, the prettiest girl, the Nobel Prize. And in 1931, the man
they called "Papa" wanted a daughter.

The birth of a third son, Gregory Hancock Hemingway, on Nov.
12, was an added complication in an already shaky marriage.

"My father had wanted a daughter badly," Greg wrote
in his 1976 book, "Papa, a Personal Memoir." "So
to my mother, my birth meant that she, or perhaps I, had blown
this last chance to make her lovable egomaniac happy." His
mother, Pauline Pfeiffer, the second of Hemingway's four wives,
left much of Greg's early upbringing to a "'verness"
named Ada, who, according to Greg, tended to respond to even
minor misbehavior by screaming, packing her bags, and fleeing
down the stairs. His father was a warmer figure, and although
he was frequently absent - reporting, writing and romancing his
next wife - Greg adored him.

Strong, stocky and keenly intelligent, the dark-eyed boy,
who fed ducks tenderly and shot them accurately, in many ways
resembled his father, who once said Greg "has the biggest
dark side in the family, except me." Father and son shared
a similar steely determination, and by age 11, Greg was showing
signs of the same athletic gifts.

That was when Ernest entered his son in the Cuban pigeon-shooting
championship. Greg defeated more than 140 contestants, including
some of the best wing shots in the world, to tie for top honors.
There were articles about him in the Havana newspapers. His father
was thrilled. But if there was triumph, there was also tumult.

Ernest ran through four wives by the time Greg was 15. He
drank heavily and allowed his young son to do the same. Greg
recalls in his memoir having his father cheerfully prescribe
him a Bloody Mary - the boy was maybe 12 - as a cure for a hangover.

The conflict over cross-dressing had worsened by 1951, when,
according to the standard account of Hemingway family history,
Greg, then 19, got in trouble over his use of a mind-altering
drug.

THE incident prompted Ernest to lash out viciously at Greg's
mother, Pauline, in a bitter phone call. The story might have
ended there, but unbeknown to anyone, Pauline had a rare tumor
of the adrenal gland that can cause a deadly surge of adrenaline
in times of stress. Within hours of the phone call with Ernest,
she had died of shock on a hospital operating table.

Ernest blamed his son for Pauline's death, and Greg, who was
deeply disturbed by the accusation, never saw his father alive
again.

That basic chronology is not in dispute, but the biographer,
Meyers, now acknowledges that there was an element missing. It
wasn't Greg's drug or alcohol use that caused Ernest to berate
Pauline shortly before she died, he told the Tribune. "I
had to cover that over a little bit in my book, because I was
very close to the family and I really couldn't wound them ..."
Meyers says. "But Ernest knew about Gregory's cross-dressing
way back in '51, and that was the cause of the dispute; not,
I think I called it, drug-taking or drinking." After his
mother's death, Greg, apparently depressed, interrupted his pre-med
studies and retreated to Africa, where he drank too much and
shot elephants - at one point 18 in a single month.

It wasn't until nearly a decade later, in 1960, that he felt
strong enough to resume his medical studies and respond to Ernest's
charges. He wrote his father a bitter letter, detailing the medical
facts of his mother's death and blaming Ernest for the tragedy.

Within months, Ernest showed serious signs of mental illness.
The next year, he would kill himself, and once again Greg would
wrestle with guilt over the death of a parent.

"I never got over a sense of responsibility for my father's
death," he wrote in his memoir, "and the recollection
of it sometimes made me act in strange ways."

***

If Greg was devastated by the death of his father, he also
confessed to a profound sense of relief. As the body was lowered
into the ground, he reflected that never again would he disappoint
the old man.

What followed was perhaps the most productive period of Greg's
life. He graduated from the University of Miami School of Medicine
in 1964, and married what was by now his third wife, Valery Danby-
Smith, the mother of three of his eight children. Living in New
York and Montana, he practiced medicine, the profession of his
paternal grandfather.

"He was a physician at heart," says his eldest daughter,
Lorian, 49, a writer. "The passion was there." In 1976,
he published his book about life with his father. Compassionate
but unflinching, it opened with an admiring introduction by Norman
Mailer and is still highly regarded by Hemingway scholars.

Precisely when Greg's demons caught up with him is unclear,
but by the early 1980s, the storm clouds were gathering. Meyers,
who spent a week with Greg and Valery while researching his book
on Ernest in 1983, recalls that Greg's marriage was breaking
up and he was acting in peculiar, and sometimes reckless, ways.

"He was very good-looking. He was very smart. I mean,
you could have some interesting talks with him. He was also,
always, very crazy," Meyers says.

By the early 1990s, Greg's finances were so precarious - he
was routinely spending every dime of the checks he received monthly
from the family estate - he at one point lived in his beat-up
Volkswagen. Apparently considering a sex change, he had gone
so far as to have a single breast implant, leaving the other
side of his chest flat.

He and Valery had been divorced, and his medical license had
been suspended in both Montana and Florida - the reason is not
known because officials in Montana, where the licensing problems
originated, say they have lost the records.

But when he and Junkins, a Hemingway scholar and retired University
of Massachusetts English professor, began running into each other
socially in Miami in 1991, it wasn't his present problems that
Greg wanted to talk about. It was his past.

He told Junkins, who would later serve as best man at Greg's
fourth wedding, about the fit Ernest threw when he caught Greg
cross-dressing as a boy.

"Gregory was 60 years old, and this is the first thing
he tells me," Junkins says. "He says he never got over
it: the raging wrath of his father." Thirty years after
his death, Ernest Hemingway was back in his son's life.

***

By 1995, the final showdown between father and son was well
under way, with Greg rejecting not only his father's hyper-masculine
code of conduct, but masculinity itself, in an act that some
consider courageous and others depict as the final, desperate
act of an unbalanced mind.

For the most part, Hemingway lived as a man after his sex
change. He had the same deep voice, the same muscular build.
Rather than adding a second breast implant, he had the first
removed at some point in the 1990s.

He stayed with his fourth wife, Ida Mae Galliher, a fine-featured
blonde who drove a Mercedes convertible and was much admired
by Coconut Grove's graying jet-setters. Florida records show
the couple divorced in 1995, after about two years of marriage,
but friends say they continued to live together in Ida's gated
coral-rock cottage.

"He was a very heterosexual guy, I guarantee it,"
Junkins says. "He and Ida weren't putting polish on each
other's nails." Ida, who declined to be interviewed for
this article, told the Miami Herald shortly after Greg's death
that she and Greg remarried in Washington state in 1997.

Hemingway mostly went by the name Greg or Gregory in the Grove,
where he frequented the Taurus Ale House, a neighborhood bar
and restaurant, in men's attire.

"He'd hang out in the afternoon, drink beer with us and
talk," recalls Taurus regular Charley Brown, 62, a writer.
"And he was just one of the guys." Rumors about Greg's
personal life did flourish, and occasionally he would be spotted
cross-dressing. But in resolutely artsy, often bizarre Coconut
Grove, Greg Hemingway wasn't the most unusual guy in the bar.

"Not by a long shot," Brown says.

Hemingway's apparent reluctance to let go of his male identity
could be explained by many factors, among them the potential
for embarrassment. But it does seem a remarkable coincidence
that, in getting a sex change, Greg chose perhaps the one path
most likely to pain and embarrass his father - and then went
on living his life much as before.

It's also interesting to note that when he did assert his
femininity, he sometimes seemed more interested in creating a
spectacle than completing a process of sincere self-transformation.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of that occurred in 1995,
when Hemingway, then 64, boarded a Miami bus, made a series of
sexual advances toward the male driver and threatened to break
his jaw.

When police arrived, Hemingway was standing outside an Amoco
station, dressed in women's clothing and talking incoherently.
Pulling up his skirt, he said to one of the officers, "Let
me show you that I'm a woman." The police officer reminded
him he was in public and told him to put down his skirt. Hemingway
responded by kicking the cop in the groin. It took three police
officers to handcuff Hemingway, who pleaded guilty to a felony
charge of battery on a police officer, but was never convicted.

***

The Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center is a long way from
the Miami of snow-white sailboats and gated Spanish mansions
where Greg Hemingway celebrated the running of the bulls at the
annual Pamplona Party in Coconut Grove.

A battered pay phone stands outside the center, a bland, four-story
building framed by scrub grass, a highway overpass and a series
of rusty pipes enclosed in a chain-link fence.

Inside, the faint smell of disinfectant lingers in a pale
green lobby with peach trim. A row of broad- shouldered, unsmiling
women play volleyball in a narrow courtyard.

Hemingway, who was examined by a corrections medical staff,
was classified as female and assigned here "basically because
of his genital organs," according to Janelle Hall, a spokeswoman
for the Miami-Dade corrections department. "It would have
been an injustice to hold him in a male facility," she says.

Hemingway, who died of heart disease and high blood pressure
on Oct. 1, spent the last days of his life on the third floor,
in a private cell used for high- profile inmates. The room is
10 feet by 10 feet, with a steel cot and two narrow windows.

Staff recall him as "a very big, robust, very learned
sort of person," Hall says. "He did not give us any
problems." At the jail, his death was just another in the
long series of hard-luck tales common to the place. To the outside
world - his obituary, which referred to his sex change and various
psychological problems, ran in publications across the country
- it may have seemed a scandal and sensation.

But in Coconut Grove, where Hemingway was well known and well
liked, it was a tragedy, a tragedy that some say could have been
prevented.

Standing outside the house where Ida Hemingway still lives,
handyman Terry Fox speaks of his friend Greg in the present tense
as he fixes the automatic gate Greg smashed with his car shortly
before his death.

"I don't think they should do that to him, ya know?"
he says of Hemingway's incarceration. "We're real upset
about that. I mean, the average burglar gets out the next day."

Lorian Hemingway goes further, claiming that her father didn't
receive vital medication while in jail.

"I do not know to whom to assign blame," she says,
"But I think his having been incarcerated for five days
on a bail of a mere $1,000 and having his life end because he
could not have the medication he needed is a criminal act, outright."
Ida Hemingway told the Miami Herald that she called the jail
repeatedly, but that she didn't bail Greg out because she thought
he needed help.

Hall declined to comment on whether Hemingway received his
high blood pressure medication in jail, citing inmate confidentiality.
Larry Cameron, director of operations for the Miami-Dade Medical
Examiner Department, declined to comment on medical details,
saying Ida Hemingway had requested that the family's privacy
be respected.

Greg Hemingway apparently did not contact his friends, several
of whom said they would have been more than happy to supply the
$100, or 10 percent, required to secure his release on bond.

***

Guests cried openly at Greg's small, private memorial service
in Coconut Grove. Hemingway's children spoke of the good times.

"These kids adored him. It says a lot about Gregory,"
Junkins says. "They know everything. Of course they do.
You know, he was their father."

Exiting the turn-of-the-century Spanish mission church where
the service was held, glancing back at the twin splashes of hot-pink
bougainvillea framing the front door, it must have been easy
for those who attended to think comforting thoughts about God,
nature and the afterlife.

But it's not at all clear that the deceased himself would
have taken refuge in such consolation.

If he had proved one thing during his long and torturous battle
with his father's shadow, it was that he, too, was a Hemingway:
stubborn and self-destructive, but also fierce and uncompromising.

Forty years before, he had considered voicing comforting cliches
at his own father's funeral, he wrote in his memoir.

He had envisioned the old man alive, aware and dreaming, a
spirit united at last with earth and sky.

But, he wrote, such visions seemed small to him, and their
comfort shallow. And his father would have considered such visions
absurd.

"Atoms can't dream, Gig," he could hear his father
say. "No use deluding yourself, old pal."

Chicago Tribune is a Tribune Co. newspaper.

A Family History

IT'S SAFE to say there are few families as fascinating as
the Hemingways. Here is a brief look at some of the family members
and their lives and their problems:

Start, of course, with Ernest. Regarded as one of America's
greatest authors, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel
Prize a year later. His adventures included driving a Red Cross
ambulance during World War I, covering the Spanish Civil War
as a news correspondent and living in Africa, where he went on
countless safaris and survived two plane crashes. All pretty
macho stuff. But he also was the boy whose mother, Grace, dressed
him and his older sister, Marcelline, as twins. Some speculate
that was the root of Ernest's attitude toward women - he long
resented Grace and refused to attend her funeral, married four
times and had countless affairs. He died in 1961, the victim
of a self-inflicted shotgun wound, after years of physical and
mental problems. He was 61.

Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, Ernest's father, took his own
life in 1928. Suffering from diabetes and depression and facing
debts, he shot himself to death with a Civil War pistol. He was
57 years old.

Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest's mother, was a former singer
and music teacher. She was extremely protective of her first
son. As he grew older, he rebelled against her nurturing - and
later against her criticism of his work. To friends, he referred
to her as "the bitch." She died in 1951 at 79.

Marcelline Hemingway was Ernest's older sister and the sibling
to whom he was closest. She maintained a famous correspondence
with her brother for many years. Marcelline died in 1963, two
years after Ernest. She was 65.

Ursula Hemingway Jepson, Ernest's younger sister, having survived
three cancer operations, committed suicide with a drug overdose
in 1966. She was 64.

Another sibling, brother Leicester Clarence Hemingway, 67,
shot himself to death in 1982 after a series of health problems.

Carol Hemingway Gardner, Ernest's youngest sister, was estranged
from her brother after he objected to her choice of fiance and
she married the young man anyway. She today is the last surviving
Hemingway sibling.

Madelaine Hemingway Miller, nicknamed "Sunny," typed
portions of her brother's novel "A Farewell to Arms,"
and later played the harp with the Memphis Symphony. She died
in 1995 at the age of 90.

Jack Hemingway, Ernest's oldest son, had a pretty interesting
life in his own right. His godparents were Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas, whom Ernest had befriended in Paris in the '20s;
his early days were recounted in his father's "A Moveable
Feast"; he was a decorated World War II veteran who spent
six months in a German POW camp; and he wrote several books,
including one about his father, and three on fishing. He died
in 2000 of complications following heart surgery. He was 77.

All of Hemingway's former wives are deceased. Martha Gellhorn,
his third wife, died most recently, in February 1998. Gregory's
mother, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, died in 1951 at age 56 of
an undiagnosed tumor.

Actress/model Margaux Hemingway, 41-year-old daughter of Jack,
died of a drug overdose in 1996. Her younger sister, Mariel,
continues to appear in films and on TV.

Hemingway's sole surviving child is son Patrick, born in 1928.
He continues to promote his father's memory as a member of the
advisory board of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.

Gender of Hemingway's son at center of
feudErnest Hemingway's son had a sex change
and became Gloria.

Now his eight children and his wife are fighting
over his estate.

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@herald.com

Patrick Hemingway hadn't seen his father in more than a year
when the two met at a Missoula, Mont., motel in June 1996.

The son knew things would be different. Still, he didn't know
exactly how different, until he saw Gregory Hemingway -- doctor,
writer, elephant-slayer and son of Ernest -- perched on a bed
in a dirty-blonde wig, a blue dress, pearl necklace and high-heeled
pumps. He'd had a sex change.

The anguish over gender identity that drove Gregory Hemingway
to become Gloria Hemingway has outlived him to become a bitter
legal battle between Gregory's eight children and Gloria's wife.
They are fighting over his estate.

At issue are the types of questions rarely arbitrated in a
South Florida courtroom: When he died Oct. 1, 2001, at the Women's
Annex of the Miami-Dade County Jail, was Gregory the sex he was
born into, or the one into which he changed? And, if Hemingway
was, indeed, a woman, could the marriage to another woman be
legally valid?

Florida law does not recognize same-sex marriages, which could
nullify a will leaving much of Hemingway's estate to Ida Hemingway,
whom he married in 1992, divorced in 1995, and then remarried
in 1997, after having undergone the sex change. (The ceremony,
conducted by a judge, took place in Washington state and Hemingway
is identified as Gregory on the marriage certificate.)

ABOUT $7 MILLION

These are not small questions. The estate of Gregory Hemingway
contains about $7 million.

A 1994 will, submitted for probate on Oct. 30, 2001 by Gregory's
children, leaves most of his estate to five of the kids. But
another will, submitted eight months later by Ida Hemingway,
leaves the bulk of his assets to her. Her attorney claims the
will is an expression of Gregory's desire to provide for her,
regardless of the validity of the marriage.

At a hearing last month, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Arthur Rothenberg
gave attorneys 45 days to write briefs before he decides whether
to accept the later will.

''You may hear argument about this marriage not being a valid
marriage,'' Nicholas Cristin, a Miami attorney for Ida Hemingway,
said at an April hearing. ``These two people certainly thought
they were married.''

Joe Gonzalez, an attorney for some of Gregory's children,
argued, however, that both Ida and Gregory Hemingway also thought
they were women.

''[Gregory] had female genitalia,'' Gonzalez said. ``So two
people with female genitalia married each other. I suspect that,
under the law, that's not a valid marriage.''

Rothenberg's decision almost certainly will blaze new trails
in an already evolving legal landscape in Florida.

Last February, a senior family court judge in Pinellas County
ruled that a transsexual named Michael Kantaras -- who had been
born Margo Kantaras -- was legally a man and granted Kantaras
custody of an adopted child, and a second child conceived with
his wife through donated sperm.

The dispute between Ida Hemingway and Gregory's children is
contained in hundreds of pages of court pleadings and sworn statements
at the Miami-Dade County Courthouse. The records suggest that
underlying the battle of Gregory's estate lies a long-simmering
resentment.

Ida and Gregory Hemingway had been married, though the marriage
was on rocky terrain, in late September 2001 when Gregory left
the couple's Bozeman, Mont., ranch for Miami. On Sept. 26, he
was arrested for indecent exposure in Key Biscayne while walking
down the road naked, a pair of women's pumps in his hand; he
died Oct. 1, 2001, of heart failure, found slumped on the floor
of the Women's Annex.

An obituary days later in Time magazine eulogized the son
of Ernest Hemingway, one of America's most masculine writers,
as ``Gloria Hemingway.''

Ida accuses some of the children of abandoning a father they
considered unseemly.

The children accuse Ida of exploiting a man who was sick and
dependent, persuading him to disinherit his own children -- as
his father had done to him.

Ida, who met Hemingway at a party in Coconut Grove celebrating
the annual Running of the Bulls in Pamploma, Spain, reserves
her most biting comments for Lorian Hemingway, the oldest of
Gregory Hemingway's children, and a successful storyteller in
her own right. Her 1998 Walk on Water was nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize and a National Book Award.

In a March 14 deposition, Ida Hemingway called the memoir
a ''crummy book'' that sought to exploit her father's ``weaknesses.''

''Her description of him . . . being dirty and greasy-haired
and his car [being] full of beer cans -- that is not a nice light
to put your father in,'' Ida said.

In her sworn statement, Lorian insists her father, who authored
the 1976 bestseller Papa: A Personal Memoir, had sought late
in life to make peace with his children.

''Ida would not allow my father to have contact with his children
[and] tried to keep him from being in touch with his children
and with his friends.'' she said in a sworn statement.

'She kept him from receiving what he needed in jail and said,
`let him rot in jail,' '' Lorian said. 'You know, `Let him stay
there. Maybe this will teach him a lesson.' ''

OFTEN DEPRESSED

Patrick Hemingway, a professional photographer from Vancouver,
said in court papers his father, who suffered from bipolar disorder
and often was depressed, remained with Ida because he feared
he could not take care of himself alone.

''Ida was very abusive to my father, and they argued a lot,''
he wrote. ``He would confide in me that Ida did not love him,
and when Ida would come in the room he would change the subject.''

Patrick said he was particularly surprised -- and disappointed
-- by the latter will because Ida had assured him in 1996 that
Gregory Hemingway did not intend to disinherit his children --
Lorian, Brendan, Vanessa, Sean, Edward, Patrick, John and Maria.

'She said, `I've seen the will. Don't worry, you kids will
all be taken care of.' I thought this strange, because I was
not worried,'' Patrick said.

This picture was taken after the supposed sex change.
More proof that there are a group of people like Anne Lawrence
who get modifications to their bodies with no interest in a social
role. Many seem to be wealthy (especially professionals,
i.e. doctors and lawyers) and in midlife crisis.

"Dr. Gregory Hemingway and his wife, Ida,
strike a pose as Bonnie and Clyde during the grand opening celebration
of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott,
Ark., in this July 4, 1999 file photo. Hemingway, novelist Ernest
Hemingway's youngest son, died of natural causes in jail, a newspaper
reported. He was 69. Bill Templeton Associated Press Published
October 4, 2001
Copyright 2003 Star Tribune. All rights reserved."